What Nuns Can Teach Us About Living Together

There’s something wonderfully radical about refusing to conform

As a child, Anne Thériault remembers, she and her best friend Angèle decided that they wanted to be nuns and live in a convent — not necessarily because she felt particularly religious but mostly because she felt “a natural inclination toward badness.”

As an adult and a feminist, Thériault says, she now finds herself wondering:

what it’s like to live without men, without their physical and emotional presence taking up space and dominating conversations. I’m attracted to the self-sufficiency of convent life, where women carry out even the most difficult and physically demanding jobs on their own. …where women do not dress or behave in a way that’s intended to entice or appease men…

Image credit: Anthony Rahayel, screen grab, YouTube

“I remember wondering if nuns were all born good, or if goodness was something that they had learned,” says Thériault.

What if nuns and the lives they lead in convents could teach women something about how to be with each other? Here’s what she found out from the nuns she visited at a nearby convent in the small town of Glen Morris, about an hour and a half outside of Toronto.